Literature and LatteA place for readers, writers, coffee drinkers and tautologies; also the home of Scrivener and Scapple, for Mac OS X and Windows.2017-12-07T03:24:51http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/feed.php?f=512017-12-07T03:24:512017-12-07T03:24:51http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38591&p=253913#p253913http://novelinaday.com

]]>2017-12-04T13:24:002017-12-04T13:24:00http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=45302&p=249281#p249281Only thing I would request is that you figure out how to get your site rated as "not pigfender porn" so I can access it from work.

You did say you wanted feedback. How about altogether too much feedback? Did you want that too?

A)I would suggest that superimposing title text on the book covers doesn't work visually. It adds a bit of cacophony to an already graphically busy block. The covers already have their titles on them. I can see that you might want to display the NiaD number, since that is not on the covers, but for the reason above, I think I would seek a different way.

B)[Update: So far, I have only checked out the site from my iPad. The comment below is a reaction to viewing the site in iPad landscape orientation. I think the current layout works better in portrait mode. The covers are bigger and one sees just two abreast, so the presentation is less busy and more sumptuous. And there is exploratory scrolling to be had!]

Another thing you might consider is whether this landing page might be more satisfying if one scrolled through panels devoted to the individual books -- maybe just cover plus blurb plus NiaD number. This would be more paced/sedate than the cover chock-a-block you have now. Calm as a post-NiaD monkey. It would also make the landing page more linger-worthy, since there would be something to do right there -- before clicking into the separate book pages and etc. (Current web design chic might also require that the covers appear alternately on the left and the right as one goes down. So, you'll be in for a pound, if you go this route. Just saying.)

An alternative to the above would be to calm down the cover block by going back to the cover art and making display-simplified versions of the covers special for this pupose. Take the blat off SWP and the running text off the bottom of each cover.* This would reduce each to its graphic and typographic essentials and they would sit together in close proximity much better, I think.

Or maybe if each cover in the block o' covers sat in a neutral rectabgle that gave it some margin from the other covers?

gr "Raining on your parade since 1984."

* The bottom text could even be replaced by some stylistically uniform info text so long as it was very simple -- the year, for example.

]]>2017-12-04T12:04:162017-12-04T12:04:16http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=45302&p=249266#p249266Up until now, that’s been hosted as a subset of pigfender.com, in all its yellow, bloggy glory.

I say “up until now”, because we’ve now gone live with a brand new novelinaday.com site. It’s completely focused on NiaD and is 100% less yellow. But of course, it still has the monkey. It also contains lovely links to social media pages for the social media-y inclined.

]]>2017-11-17T17:56:072017-11-17T17:56:07http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40281&p=241842#p241842I do wonder if part of the proliferation of swearing in current written works is directly proportional to the proliferation of swearing in the “real world”. I do know that it is much more prevalent in today’s professional world than it was 10 years ago.

BethCutter wrote:Maybe it's just me, but I always feel that genre novels involve a sort of contract with the readers. Certain things they have a 'right' to expect to be included or exclude. And if you are not even aware of those unwritten conventions, how can you possibly fulfill your end of it?

I totally agree! But that's one of the nice things about NiaD. If you don't know them, that's not your fault or your problem. Most of the conventions you talk about are book-wide contracts not chapter or paragraph-to-paragraph contracts, so it's on me to make sure that the chapter briefs include the necessary world features and plot markers that a reader would demand.

Seems right to me, too, Beth. And this is really interesting to think about in relation to NiaD. Maybe we could roughly split these expectations into two kinds: expectations about a) the nature of the fictional world and what happens there and expectations about b) the sensibility of the narrative and so, in part, the manner in which things happen.

A) The World and the What

Some of these expectations about the world and what happens are broadly framed out by Rog, but the chapter authors certainly also have a hand in this also from closer-in. But it seems to me that the NiaDs thus far have been rather carefully crafted so as to have a firm foot in reality -- even the superheroes don't actually have superpowers.* (* 3 Ghosts is an exception and a cautious foray outside that basic boundary.) So, I feel like I do know a great deal about what are the expectations of this sort when working. Gremlins are out. Nice suits are in.

B) The Sensibility and the Manner

There are most definitely (unintended) shifts of style, and styling of details and character, between chapters. But far from being a deficit, I actually think this is one of the most interesting and entertaining things about reading these NiaD books -- style shifting from gritty to glass-and-steel; the main character shifting from action to contemplative, from smooth to taciturn. One day the main character is a scruffy loner in a down and out flat, and tomorrow is a landed urbanite with actual friends.

But there certainly are other shifts of manner that are not so happy. In my own experience as a reader of NiaD books, the jags in sensibility/manner that stand out for me as negatives are jaggy not because they are genre-breakages, but because they offend my own sensibilities. It seems some authors will relentlessly f-bomb their chapter no matter what it is about. And one could be excused sometimes for suspecting that some authors write because they feel they don't get enough opportunity in real life for cussing and bawling and leering. I won't even mention the still-unforgiven spreadsheet masturbation scene. But I am pretty sure a genre tag would not kerb any of that. And so I guess I have (for good or ill) just chalked it up to the nature of the beast, because there are all kinds of people writing in all kinds of ways. So this sort of expectation is one I just expect will be flouted.

One of the interesting effects of the growth of NiaD is that there are now almost always multiple versions of chapters and so, as in my own web version of the books, I can by navigation put together a version of the book that tends this way or that in style, and, I might add, can choose to navigate around that egregious outlier chapter I don't think my delicate sensibilities can tolerate.

In Conclusion

NiaD is the Portsmouth Sinfonia of literature! It works not because the voices magically blend so well that you get the greatest symphony performance ever. It works because it doesn't really fit together like that but everyone is working so hard at it that it becomes something else, something you haven't heard before -- and you have to keep listening.

And just like the Sinfonia it really only works if the participants are earnestly trying to do the thing -- to really play their part in the symphony. So, paradoxically, though we need to earnestly try to blindly collaborate, what makes the result "work" is not that everything did in fact fit together.

[[Disclosure: Having said all that, I feel I must confess one of my all-time favorite chapters in a NiaD is a complete, self-conscious genre buster. It was that rare exception that you can't bring yourself to mentally reprimand though you know you should -- because it was just so well done, so dead funny in the context, so unexpected and taken farther and just far enough that the lid came off.]]

pigfender wrote:

gr wrote:In fact, my wife and I had some good sport before NiaD trying to reverse-engineer the genre module of your brain and made bets against each other about which way you would jump with NiaD 2017.

What did you come up with?

Ha! Well, I can't tell you that, because of course the bet is already on again for 2018!

BethCutter wrote:Maybe it's just me, but I always feel that genre novels involve a sort of contract with the readers. Certain things they have a 'right' to expect to be included or exclude. And if you are not even aware of those unwritten conventions, how can you possibly fulfill your end of it?

I totally agree! But that's one of the nice things about NiaD. If you don't know them, that's not your fault or your problem. Most of the conventions you talk about are book-wide contracts not chapter or paragraph-to-paragraph contracts, so it's on me to make sure that the chapter briefs include the necessary world features and plot markers that a reader would demand.

BethCutter wrote:But, yes, I suppose I can see the argument that NIAD is a genre of it's own, so the writer is free to add a time traveling Sherlock Holmes to the contemporary paranormal romance , why not?

Well, I'd prefer you kept to the reality set up in the brief, but, yeah, you can set the tone / voice for your chapter.

gr wrote:In fact, my wife and I had some good sport before NiaD trying to reverse-engineer the genre module of your brain and made bets against each other about which way you would jump with NiaD 2017.

What did you come up with?

vic-k wrote:Scouring the depths of the abyss that is Rog's brain, is in fact a genre as yet to be defined ... a hellish scary one at that!

]]>2017-11-10T20:36:512017-11-10T20:36:51http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40281&p=241489#p241489But, yes, I suppose I can see the argument that NIAD is a genre of it's own, so the writer is free to add a time traveling Sherlock Holmes to the contemporary paranormal romance , why not?

Jaysen wrote:I think we are back to the question: are we all just pigments of Vic-k's imagination?

Not necessarily, numpt. It could be a goatment, or a sheepment, or a cowment, or even a pussycatment.If it was figment, it could in fact be a prunement, or an avocadoment, or a plumment, or a grapement, or even a passionfruitmentHey up!! 'ang on! If piggy reads this post, he could see in it the kernel ... or is it colonel, wottevva, of the seed for Niad 8 ... ripe for germination. Or is it German nation, anyway, it'll defy genreisation , won't it?

gr wrote:In fact, my wife and I had some good sport before NiaD trying to reverse-engineer the genre module of your brain and made bets against each other about which way you would jump with NiaD 2017.

Scouring the depths of the abyss that is Rog's brain, is in fact a genre as yet to be defined ... a hellish scary one at that!

pigfender wrote:We’re not really coming up with different genres in the truest sense. In my mind, genres are a mixture of three things: 1) a reality, 2) a story, and 3) an emotion*. * - you can read more about my genre classification theories / procrastinations here: http://www.pigfender.com/index.php/2014 ... s-a-genre/

In fact, my wife and I had some good sport before NiaD trying to reverse-engineer the genre module of your brain and made bets against each other about which way you would jump with NiaD 2017.

Wife: What the...? Is this something from vic-k? J: uh... no. This is someone called grrrrrrr.W: Fine[sits through video][sits in silence for a moment][replays video]W: Well...J: Yeah?W: Well what it says is that I need to monitor who you hang out with better.

I am so confused right now.

I think we are back to the question: are we all just pigments of Vic-k's imagination?

Wife: What the...? Is this something from vic-k? J: uh... no. This is someone called grrrrrrr.W: Fine[sits through video][sits in silence for a moment][replays video]W: Well...J: Yeah?W: Well what it says is that I need to monitor who you hang out with better.

Wife: What the...? Is this something from vic-k? J: uh... no. This is someone called grrrrrrr.W: Fine[sits through video][sits in silence for a moment][replays video]W: Well...J: Yeah?W: Well what it says is that I need to monitor who you hang out with better.

]]>2017-11-09T10:27:102017-11-09T10:27:10http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40281&p=241413#p241413Everyone’s reasons were a little bit different. Mine centred on what people would do with that information:

Some people would use the knowledge to research and do a whole load of prep, which contradicts the whole “everyone is in the same boat” part of NiaD.

Some people would use the knowledge to decide not to take part, which I’m hardly going to knowingly facilitate! Plus, I’m always a little bit jealous of people in this position. An opportunity to write a chapter in a genre you’re completely unfamiliar with? That’s the NiaD event at its most challenging and most exciting, and where you learn the most about your own “voice”.

But as others have mentioned... We’re not really coming up with different genres in the truest sense. In my mind, genres are a mixture of three things: 1) a reality, 2) a story, and 3) an emotion*. In NiaD, I dictate (1) and (2) but leave (3) completely up to you. This is what GR was referring to in how NiaDs aren’t really genre fiction... that third element of deciding which emotion you want to evoke defines a lot of what you get from a genre, and that’s where the writer’s craft really comes into play!